If this is your first visit, be sure to
check out the FAQ by clicking the
link above. You may have to register
before you can post: click the register link above to proceed. To start viewing messages,
select the forum that you want to visit from the selection below.

Let's say I was interested in a Silent Hunter game, should I go straight to 5 or is it one of those where newer isn't always better?

I could never really get into the Silent Hunters, but be warned that 5 uses UPlay in its worst form (the one that actually streams content off the servers). So unless you have a stable connection, don't go past 4.

4 was a pretty big graphical update over 3. 3 is still playable, but it definitely looks dated. 4 is sexy, and 5 is sexier (visually).

Steam: Gundato
PSN: Gundato
If you want me on either service, I suggest PMing me here first to let me know who you are.

Silent Hunter 5 was awful upon release and as far as I'm aware had rubbish tutorial. Silent Hunter 3 is supposed to be great and very complete + there is a mod out for it that updates a lot of stuff.

I hear 4's good too, and has the middle ground between usability and graphics.

As I said, 5 was supposed to be very poo upon release, though I think there are quite a few people saying it's quite good now since most issues are fixed.

Up to you really, 3, 4 or 5 have all got things going for them. For what it's worth, my dad was able to get into Silent Hunter 5 and he's not really a gamer so it might be worth a shot. Not sure what the state of the DRM is, I assume it's Uplay.

Wow, am I glad I asked (Answer: yes)! I think I'll probably pass, it's not like I'll play them anyway, but I do like the thought of having yet another type of vehicle sim ready to go should I ever feel the need, and these are cheaaaaap. Hmm.

Both 4 and 5 say Tages DRM, and that's a big black mark against them. Summary: Most likely no buy.

I was wondering this, mostly because the minimum specs claim 4Gb is necessary, whereas my aged and unlikely-to-be-upgraded-any-time-soon I-hesitate-to-dignify-it-with-the-label-"rig" has only 2. Does that mean I would be entirely unable to play the game, or just that I'd have to turn all the knobs right down and my whales would look like crude cubist approximations?

a damned fine narrative with a (mostly) successful attempt at making it feel like your actions have consequences, give it a shot. I loved it.

I couldn't disagree more. I found the narrative to be extremely predictable and bland , mostly thanks to the terrible voice acting, and the logic behind the chaos system is as arbitrary as it gets. The game is worth it because of the level design and the mechanics alone, but the story is nowhere near good.

I was wondering this, mostly because the minimum specs claim 4Gb is necessary, whereas my aged and unlikely-to-be-upgraded-any-time-soon I-hesitate-to-dignify-it-with-the-label-"rig" has only 2. Does that mean I would be entirely unable to play the game, or just that I'd have to turn all the knobs right down and my whales would look like crude cubist approximations?

The required specs of Dishonored were strongly inflated I dare to say. Probably to please the PC crowd and make the impression that the game on PC will be much more graphically advanced than on the consoles.

It supposedly requires Vista or later Windows but works just fine on XP without any tweaking. It supposedly requires a GeForce GTX 460 as a minimum but works just fine without any issues on 8800 GT. I think this video is not spoof, it supposedly shows you how it runs with under required specs just fine (and there are others): http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ya7xsmN9hM

It is an Unreal 3 engine game, if you can run some others of those I am rather certain Dishonored will not cause you trouble.

I was wondering this, mostly because the minimum specs claim 4Gb is necessary, whereas my aged and unlikely-to-be-upgraded-any-time-soon I-hesitate-to-dignify-it-with-the-label-"rig" has only 2. Does that mean I would be entirely unable to play the game, or just that I'd have to turn all the knobs right down and my whales would look like crude cubist approximations?

The amount of RAM wouldn't impact visual quality to a great extent, anyway. Worst thing I can imagine is that you'll experience some form of "loading stutter" more frequently or suffer from prolonged loading times in general.

The amount of RAM wouldn't impact visual quality to a great extent, anyway. Worst thing I can imagine is that you'll experience some form of "loading stutter" more frequently or suffer from prolonged loading times in general.

That's certainly not the worst thing I can imagine. RAM is not only used for loading level textures and the like, but also NPCs and their patrol paths. So you might run into problems when you reach areas larger than the prison with many more NPCs. On the other hand, it's a console port, so they must have gotten it to run on 256 megs minimum. It's unlikely that you'll run into game-breaking problems with 2 gigs of RAM.

Originally Posted by Pabraw

The required specs of Dishonored were strongly inflated I dare to say. Probably to please the PC crowd and make the impression that the game on PC will be much more graphically advanced than on the consoles.

Inflating the minimum specs to appeal to core games sounds like the stupidest marketing strategy ever. I think they're just covering their asses in the event that people wouldn't be able to run their game on lower specs.

The streets of Dunwall are in general rather empty and even the fortress type buildings are not too crowded. It suits well with the theme of a decaying city but the reason for it might indeed be in the memory limit of the consoles (and especially the PS3 with itīs 256 meg dedicated RAM).

The issue of vanishing corpses on PC (the limit of simultaneously allowed corpses could be raised in some .ini) was certainly due to that, as is probably the case with vanishing corpses of mutants in Rage.

As to the reason of inflating - yeah, certainly the publishers rather go to the safe side and exaggerate just in case. But in the case of Dishonored I assume there still was a bit of bluffing to please involved.

If you look at the comments on latter PC requirements reveals the higher requirements are usually met with more praise and low ones with damning the consoles.

When Dishonored specs did not contain support for XP and mentioned something about being optimised for 64-bit systems, this got thumbs up in the comments for finally letting go of the old technology.

Whereas at the same time people were wondering why the requirements still stayed at Direct X 9.0 ...

In Min Spec terms - a 8800GT is probably not-far-off-as-powerful as a GTX460 ;)

RAM is all about minimising stutter - getting everything loaded before you need it - so the worst case would be longer loading times and FPS drops whilst it's trying to keep-up.

If you were using XP it would matter less but W7 needs just under/over 1Gb to "do it's thing" so you don't have much left for the game.

I've been looking at game memory use a bit recently and most modern games seem to easily eat 2-3Gb of RAM - which is why they ask for 4Gb and why it's now becoming possible to see benefits to having more than 4Gb.

It will probably work in 2Gb - just shutdown EVERYTHING ELSE including browsers (especially browsers), AV, chat clients, music players and other tasktray shit.